Thursday, April 19, 2012

Normans and Saxons

Following up the games on Monday with David, John popped for a couple quick games on Thursday. I wanted to try out Normans versus Saxons with the latest draft so John took the Normans and I fully expected to be slaughtered…

GAME ONE

FORCES

Normans1x Knight General7x Knights2x Spear2x Bow

Anglo-Danish1x Blade General2x Blade9x Spear

THE GAME

The Anglo-Danish were defending so I chose at road for my compulsory terrain and a waterway and two gentle hills for the optional…. I’d debated taking some bad going – difficult hills or woods or such – hoping it might clutter up the field a bit and cause the Normans to be split up a bit and I could perhaps launch an attack on one of the smaller segments – much as I had (attempted to do) in a game with Christian a while back… but ultimately decided against it.

(Remember: click on the pictures for a bigger version)

The Anglo-Danish on the left, the Normans on the right. The Waterway kind of cramped out deployment zone.

After the first bound or two we’d straightened out our lines and I just sat with one end anchored on a hill and awaited the Normans charge.

Steadily the came – not getting ahead of their supporting infantry on the flanks.

BLAM! The lines met and John could not stop rolling ones!?

The Normans lost three Knights and a Bow. The English lost two spear.

Game over…

Wow…

That was fast.

Now I should mention that I was cheating. I realized after the second game when we were figuring out probability and I was rereading through the flank support and realized that it is only against other FOOT!? (DOH!!!) Not that I would have mattered a whole lot as the rolls were pretty ghastly.

Well since that was so fast we rolled up some new terrain and tried again…

GAME TWO

No Waterway this time, just three gentle hills…. Which I just realized was not legal… there should have been SOME kind of bad-going… DOH!!!

The lines meet!

Normans lost two Knights, including the General and I lost two spear…

In the following bound I moved my General and Blade s down the hill a bit to meet the Norman Bow and destroyed them… end of game…

Again, atrocious luck on John’s part. Though I may not have actually killed his General if I hadn’t been such a big dummy and… well… been cheating!

Anyway, we spent some time figuring out odds of various outcomes and ultimately decided that it all seemed to work out rather well.

Spear versus Knight for example; 4/36 (11%) Spear will KO the Knights, 10/36 (28%) the Knights will break though and ride down the spear, and the remaining 22/36 (61%) the Knights will recoil from the spear…. Spear is pretty solid. Sure, there’s a chance the Knights will ride them down… but it’s more likely that the Knights will recoil and there is a chance that they will impale themselves on the spears and die.

Blades seem considerably more volatile – 15/36 (42%) they will be swept away by the knights, 8/36 (22%) they will destroy the Knights, the remaining 13/36 (36%) The Knights recoil from the Blade… Compared to Spear the Blade have double the chances of killing the knights, but are also almost twice as likely to be killed by the Knights.

I’d definitely like to try this again (without… y’know… cheating!?) and also try a Viking vs. Norman battle.